Sunday, April 13, 2014

Asghar Farhadi on The Past

This is another great bilingual interview with Asghar Farhadi, same interviewer, same interpreter, about a different film, which is the sequel to his film The Separation, called The Past [gozashteh] filmed in Paris and starring Bérénice Bejo. Farhadi has more to say here about the nature of cross-cultural interaction in the Internet age and his sense of universal connectedness and responsibility in today's world. In The Past, a woman tries to kill herself after pirated emails are forwarded to her about her husband's affair with another woman. The emails were pirated by Lucie [played by Pauline Burlet], the daughter of Bejo's character (for reasons that are not clear to me). In this interview we learn that for Farhadi this illicit disclosure establishes a connection between the man Bejo's character is divorcing [Ahmad, played by Ali Mostaffa] and the woman who tried to commit suicide, even though they never met. The plot for Farhadi's film About Elly [dar bareh-ye eli] also turns on the disclosure of a lover's betrayal, but in that film the lead character Sepideh [played by Golshifteh Farahani] lies and does NOT reveal to Ahmed [Shahab Hosseini] the fact that Elly [Taraneh Alidoosti] had turned away from him emotionally before she disappeared from his life. Either way, according to the circumstances, when the truth is known or not known about faded love the consequences could be fatal, at least according to Asghar Farhadi.